DIY Rag Rug from Old Jeans and T-Shirts

Happy Earth Day! I hope you are doing your part to promote a clean environment. It doesn’t matter if you live in a big city, a small suburb, or somewhere in between – every little bit helps! As part of my commitment to the modern environmental movement of Earth Day I started in my very own apartment. 

A big part of helping the environment is reducing waste in our landfills. As I was going through some old clothes, I came upon a bunch of pairs of jeans that were too worn out to donate to charity, but I didn’t want to just throw them away. What a waste! So I decided to make them into a crocheted rag rug.

Seriously, look at all these clothes I had lying around!

So I picked out some colors to go together and started cutting. I cut the jeans into 1″ strips and I cut the t-shirts into 1.5 – 2″ strips. In some of the rag rug tutorials I looked at I saw that they rolled the strips into balls, but I didn’t really find the need to do that. The strips were so thick that they didn’t really run the risk of getting tangled. Here’s my one tip: try to keep each t-shirt and/or pair of jeans in just one strip if possible. It really helps things when you don’t have to connect all the strips together. Basically I cut the jeans strips starting at one pant leg and then circled around to the other. For the t-shirts I just started at the bottom and did a lot of curving around as I cut.

I ended up using about four pairs of old jeans and six t-shirts. However, I’m a bigger gal, so my jeans are big…so you might end up using a bit more if you’re using smaller jeans. Once I had all my strips together I started crocheting. I hadn’t crocheted anything in a while, and prior to this rag rug the only thing I had ever crocheted was a scarf. For the very best crochet rag rug tutorial I suggest this tutorial from Sugar Bee Crafts. She actually has some videos on that page that show the most simple crochet stitch as well as tips for starting/shaping the rug.

I’ll tell you this, if you start with denim, the beginning of the rug is going to look like a hot mess at first. Like a big denim blob. But eventually it starts looking REALLY good.

I alternated two rows of denim with three rows of t-shirt strips, and then I alternated the blue t-shirt strips with the green. I really like how the rug turned out. It’s not perfectly shaped, but just seeing it every day and knowing that I MADE it out of old materials – it’s so satisfying. And the dogs like it too!